


Rewind

by NicoleAnell



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-07-31
Updated: 2007-07-31
Packaged: 2017-10-06 01:04:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/48008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NicoleAnell/pseuds/NicoleAnell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set after "Crossroads".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rewind

**Author's Note:**

> One of my fics for [](http://community.livejournal.com/twicetoldfandom/profile)[**twicetoldfandom**](http://community.livejournal.com/twicetoldfandom/). Huge thanks to [](http://spiletta42.livejournal.com/profile)[**spiletta42**](http://spiletta42.livejournal.com/) and [](http://dionusia.livejournal.com/profile)[**dionusia**](http://dionusia.livejournal.com/) for beta'ing!

There are some places on this ship that aren't even supposed to exist. Dogsville is only the newest. The bar is another. The Cylon holding cell, in comparison, is a venerable years-old institution. It's a site of patched-together information and strange trivia. Fact: Helo lived there for two months, when it was more a suite than a cell. None of it was recorded.

The camera was off by that point. It had been for a while. They'd installed it only briefly to feel something was being done about Sharon 2. Something besides all the thick metal, the kind of stuff Vipers are made of, fused into walls and criss-crossed bars. And inside that was another room in glass, and inside that was later a couch and bedding and lamps where Helo and Athena made their home long after they stopped locking the door.

Helo was Lee's first pilot to come back from the dead.

\-----------------------

The thing about that camera, though, is all the files were lost once they moved on to the next thing. It wouldn't be used that way again until Baltar, and only until the first lawyer made a fuss about it going against the Articles. It was inhuman, he said, that constant surveillance. They knew this. It hadn't been about him.

They took it off him and put it on the Cylon. To watch the monitor and say, "She how she moves when she's alone? See how she's listening, like someone's there speaking to her?" But there's no wireless channel, no signal coming in or out. They've checked.

It's Lee who said, "She's nuts."

They took it off the Cylon and put it on Kara.

\-----------------------

She could like the Major, though. He eyes her suspiciously, waiting, but he doesn't turn his distrust into false arrogance, these unwarranted attempts at intimidation they give her sometimes. Overeager to put her in her place when she has barely stepped out of it.

Fact: While a few short-stick crew members were rapidly clearing Helo and Athena's furniture away, setting them up in conventional quarters, the Cylon shared a cell with Baltar for about ten minutes, during which he was still unconscious and her forehead was touching the far end of the wall. Tigh said, "Open fire if it moves," and she fixed her peripheral vision on Baltar. The first thing on her monitor, later, was the word "No." She was alone. They would rewind and listen, trying to make sense of it. Her voice was a tremor overflowing with relief and terror and violence, all those at once.

Fact, unrecorded: She was answering the voice in her head that said, _Do you know why you're here?_

\-------------------------------------

This is something he does. Live the supposed-to way. Learn the rules, stay in the lines. He was his dad before he was his grandpa, until the Pegasus crashed. It could've been anything. It was a mad, beautiful prophet with democracy in her hands. It was a woman on Cloud Nine with a little girl who would've been his daughter. He married to be married. It was the next rung on the ladder.

Lee Adama recreates relationships. But.

Kara is Kara, always. She's not his mother.

\-------------------------------------

Apart from the blood test, this is the best idea they had. A sign in the brig, a video monitor. To study her - not her, exactly, but her movement? Like they'll catch a mistake somewhere, rewinding and rewinding the footage, they'll find that fatal error, the sentence that will give her away. Like her eyes will change color, her spine will glow, and they'll have proof.

This is retarded. This is chasing tails.

Put her in a cockpit, little boys, she'll show you who she is.

\-----------------------

It's Colonial Day, two days after the trial ends and suddenly ceases to matter. He's back in a uniform. Lee doesn't know anymore what kind of system he's in. They are on the run, a gang of roving mercy. There are some people on this ship who aren't supposed to exist.

They've taken the camera somewhere else, not this cell. He's in a uniform and no one is looking. He feels her mouth with his, and then heat inside his stomach, warm and suddenly. She drapes her arms over his head, wrists still shackled - that tart piece of silver, he feels it at the back of his neck, and then groping and digging gently against his shoulder, and then hovering just over his back. He can draw you a diagram of how they ended up, her arms gradually coming to push down on his, trapping them together. It's erratic clumsy movement and yes _yes_ he doesn't let out all the names in his head. He makes primitive noises, pre-language, before names, before gods, before metal that looked like skin, before there was resurrection because there had never been a single death.

She, though, calls him _Gaius_ at least four times, so many he thinks she was programmed to say it.

Lee Adama recreates relationships. The story is the same. Fact (please): the Cylon is never Kara.

\-----------------------

There's another piece of video, but they're still working with it. The visual explosion of her ship, when they watched it, finally, was out of the gun camera's range. It's not there. There was a peripheral flare-up on the edge, a slightly brighter shade of green. Just light, dancing. It could've been anything. Lee will admit this, eventually, the uncertainty of it. Not the firework clarity, the bits of flaming metal everywhere, the radio dead forever, no takebacks. His father will hate him again.

\-----------------------

"Was she beautiful?" the Cylon wonders. It's something Shevon never asked, something Dualla knew.

"Yeah. She is." He has no reason to sound so defensive with his present-tense.

The Cylon says, "How is it that you lost her?" She's nuts and hears things that are true.

He puts his pants back on. He puts hers on too, because of the chains and awkwardness, and helping her in this is much less urgent and sexy than it was the first time. Detaching themselves had been the first abrupt snap back to reality. She'd draped her arms around him, shackles and all. He had to bend his head down for her to release him from this, like a knight in a story, receiving a title or a garland from the gods. This thing with their arms happened last, after he rolled off a piece of bedsheet that had stuck lightly to his thigh, and even further after she lifted and reclosed her legs in one last graceful manuever, shutting him out again with regal precision.

It had occurred to him that this trembling girl-shaped creature, with her ribs sticking through her chest, might find a way to kill him. He thought he was done wishing things like that, even for a second.

\-----------------------

But it really is there on the tape. The only physical proof of whatever happened out there, the mandala, the visions collapsing around her. Just a little flash on the edge of the screen, her death reduced to a subtle movie trick. Lee almost sees it but is too unsure to say. He knows. Slightly brighter shade of green, like mint in the grass, like the edge of her party dress tucked in among military blues, for just a second, it's dancing.

\-----------------------

The Cylon wonders, "Were you happy? Were you lonely?" This is not an either/or scenario. She is Six. She was named for the dead. She has been both, in love.

He wants to hedge and say, "I don't know." Wants to fence. But he has lying tics and she already knows them. "Yeah, I was happy," Lee says. "New Caprica. We were in the woods..." he stops here, not like he's finished, only like he's organizing his memories, mouth lingering open. What will he say next? She is waiting to observe.

She asks, "Day or night?" She wants to feel this in her mind. She wants to know if it smelled like pollen, if they could see the birds.

"Night," he says, so it was the other, and she becomes just a touch less interested, but he doesn't notice. "Just a really dark night. I only... I only kept seeing these small pieces of her. Mostly her eyes, the dots in the center. Her teeth? I don't even know, I was drunk, honestly. I think I remember more than actually happened - it did happen, but what I saw was..."

He's lost her.

He does this sometimes.

\-----------------------

They rewind what came from the monitor. The constant surveillance is inhuman, because it's a truthful memory.

It's all she knows, she's told you this already. She saw a light and her mom. She's not angry anymore.

Without the anger, she hasn't disappeared. She always thought she would.

No, and everything went black, that's all. She wasn't burning. It could've been anything.

\-----------------------

Fact: D'Anna made a movie once. The fleet watched it for morale. On Caprica, after they'd taken a vote and stepped away from the human race temporarily forever, the Cylon saw it too. Stored that one reel away in her memory, where she could replay it again and again - yet she would also physically watch it again, knowing every pause and vocal flutter by heart. The words _Vice President_ were on the screen, and there was a person she'd never met above them, but she wanted to know him, because he had the same face as someone she loved.

The footage went on mid-sentence each time - "-ust doing our jobs, aren't we?" he was gushing, too forced, and every time he would push further. "I'm just doing my job. You're just doing your job." He looked like an imbecile. He never smiled so hard with her. He never looked so keenly like he was being judged. She would mouth this with him, when he talked about leadership. When his eyes flickered with discomfort at the mention of death. And still _Vice President_, and she was told he was a criminal and a bastard, and this is who she remembered and wanted in her arms. She could not reconcile this with the quivering politician D'Anna had found. The truth would be somewhere inside. She watched again and again, this video resurrection, this almost-miracle. She fell in love with the question, too.

\-----------------------

He's talking about New Caprica again, when he was happy and then lonely. They had one night in the dark he doesn't fully remember, except how it felt. Lee says, "It was like this whole world just..."

"Made sense," the Cylon says softly, and she may be crying, but she's so stoic that one hanging tear looks like an optical illusion. Her life reduced to a subtle movie trick.

Lee shakes his head just a little, looking at her - fully looking now, because he's caught it again, because he's standing in a suit in front of a damned soul and he just wants to make himself understood. "No," he says. "It didn't make sense at all. I didn't care."

\-----------------------

They'll let her free soon, because the camera found nothing and Lee's memories are human. But now, Kara is sick of the monitor. Where someone else would tie a noose, she invents a slingshot to break the camera, finally, in a way that no one notices for seventeen hours. She looks innocent, which on Kara means "guilty" and also means "laughing about this for years."

Do you see, Lee, there's nothing but a person. Still a screw-up, even now, but she'll get the message to you, even if she has to scream it, even if she has to hit you, even if she has to paint it in block letters over your head.

\-------------------------------

"I want to ask you something. I want you to tell me. What do you see?" Lee is in the cell where no one's looking. She is waiting to observe. He stumbles over the equipment, makes too much noise. The tape is starting to wear down but it's not gone yet. He has it in his pocket, in a canister, and then it's in the machine, and then it's flickering over his face, over her naked back, and he hits STOP and finds the canvas screen and says to the Cylon, "Here, right- right here." Shades of green and stars like eyes and something firing in the dark, a clumsy Viper nose blocking too much of the view, but there at the side, rewind it again, frame by frame the sky opens, finally, and she sees God.


End file.
